Long Hair, Don’t Care: Welcome to the Great Pubic Hair Grow-Back
“I got mugged!” Carrie Bradshaw proclaims in season three, episode 14 of Sex and the City. “She took everything I got.”
She’s not talking about cash — what’s missing isn’t her purse or her wallet. It’s her pubic hair. The thief in question is an esthetician who, without Carrie noticing, stripped her bare when all she’d wanted was a routine bikini wax.
The episode aired in 2000, 13 years after seven sisters from Brazil — Janea, Judseia, Jussara, Juracy, Jocely, Joyce, and Jonice Padilha — opened a salon, aptly dubbed J. Sisters, on Manhattan’s West 57th Street. There, legend has it, the Brazilian bikini wax was born. By the early 2000s, a completely hairless undercarriage would become de rigueur, helped along by fashion’s preference for titillatingly low-rise waistlines, celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow (who once thanked J. Sisters for changing her life — yes, really), and pop culture moments like the aforementioned episode of Sex and the City.
Carrie describes her newfound baldness in humbling terms: She’s been robbed; she feels like a “hairless dog.” As amusing as it is, the scene hits at a profound truth: Pubic hair, and the lack thereof, is inextricable from notions of power and gender. Razors and hot wax aren’t just means to a (smooth) end — they’re tools laden with messages about sexual politics and subjugation.
According to Breanne Fahs, professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, pubic hair removal is a relatively new practice — it started in the ’70s in pornography and didn’t catch on outside of the adult entertainment industry until the ’80s.
Of course, razors — perhaps the most accessible hair removal tool — were available long before then. Gillette, inventor of the disposable safety razor, was founded in 1901 and flourished during World War I, when the US military began issuing Gillette shaving kits to soldiers. In 1915, the company introduced its first razor for women, a move that was, in part, a response to the rise of sleeveless fashions. (An early advertisement for the razor declared, “a feature of good dressing and good grooming is to keep the underarm white and smooth.”)
Still, razors were primarily being used on the face, leg, and underarm area — our pubic regions hadn’t yet entered the chat. But in 1975, Hustler magazine published a spread that would shift perceptions of where hair should and shouldn’t grow, specifically on vaginas. As Rebecca Herzig recounts in her 2015 book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, the publication ran photos of “very young models without visible pubic hair under the headline ‘Adolescent Fantasy.’ The feature provoked ‘enthusiastic responses’ from male readers and organized outrage from feminists.” In the years following, Herzig writes, “content analyses confirm a sharp decline in visible pubic hair on nude centerfold models.” The absence of pubic hair in adult content wasn’t a fleeting fad — it stuck. Pornography’s hairless norm persists today, according to Alan McKee, a leading researcher of pornography and the head of the University of Sydney’s School of Art, Communication and English.
It’s a phenomenon that has real effects on what viewers think genitalia should look like. According to Fahs, research suggests that porn shapes pubic hair attitudes and behaviors. “We see pubic hair disappearing in porn before we see it disappearing on women in the public at large,” she says, citing several large-scale studies by research scientist and sex educator Debby Herbenick. Olivia, who asked to use a pseudonym, received some of her earliest messages about pubic hair from “guys in middle school and high school talking about porn in the locker room.” The same goes for Christopher, who requested to be identified by his first name only. He went to an all-boys school where he often heard disparaging comments about pubic hair made by “guys talking about girls.”
Leah Mandel, 33, recalls an ex-boyfriend who sent her a text saying he fantasized about her with a “shaved pussy.” In the moment, she was appalled. “It made me feel like my pubic hair was part of my identity,” she says. Looking back, she acknowledges that her ex’s comment was probably a reflection of what he was seeing in porn.
To Fahs, the rise of hairlessness in pornography and, consequently, the mainstream connects to larger cultural narratives about gender and power. Hustler published those fateful photos in 1975, the same year the United Nations held the first World Conference on Women, Susan Brownmiller published the feminist tome Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, and the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to deny women jury service. As “[women] are gaining ground in their work lives, they’re supposedly gaining ground in their sexual lives,” Fahs says of the ’70s. At the same time, “we’re also seeing the eroticization and the normalization of different forms of symbolic powerlessness.” One of those forms, Fahs believes, is the popularization of pubic hair removal in porn and, eventually, beyond.
“We have a long history of associating hair with power and hairlessness with powerlessness,” Fahs says, citing hirsute representations of Christ, often depicted with copious facial hair, and political leaders throughout history. During the Enlightenment era, hair was seen as an indicator of one’s intelligence, health, and moral constitution, according to Herzig. French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, once claimed that the absence of body hair on indigenous Americans reflected their feebleness and lack of virility. As Herzig writes, “Hairlessness was thus thought to indicate whether indigenous peoples might be treated as equal subjects.”
To Fahs, pornography’s eroticization of hairless women simply plays on these tropes — it suggests that “women are more desirable when they’re performing a certain kind of powerlessness.” That’s perhaps why women who subvert shaving expectations often trigger such emotional responses: They’re disgusting; they’re unhygienic; they’ve let themselves go.
Still, we’re beginning to see culture move beyond gendered body hair norms. In 2018, a student at the University of Exeter started “Januhairy,” a month-long campaign that encouraged women to grow out their body hair instead of shaving it. Since then, we’ve witnessed the rise of the so-called “body hair activist”: women and femmes who flaunt their hairiness, defying cultural expectations.
Personal care brands are also starting to offer products for those who embrace their hair. There’s always been a financial incentive for razor companies and waxing salons to encourage hair removal. But in 2015, Fur, a pubic hair care brand, began offering an alternative to the “shave it or nothing” mindset that most beauty brands operate under.
Fur’s hero product is a nourishing pubic hair oil poured in a chic, glass bottle. “People felt embarrassed, people felt shame,” Fur co-founder Laura Schubert says of the general attitude toward pubic hair in the 2010s. “It was an exciting moment and opportunity to change the conversation — to reframe a topic that was embarrassing, that was whispered about, into something beautiful and elevated.”
If the early 2000s Brazilian wax craze was the final frontier of pubic hairlessness, Maison Margiela’s Spring 2024 Couture show was the moment hairiness re-entered the zeitgeist: In January, the fashion house sent models down the runway in merkins (pubic wigs) that were entirely visible through their sheer, gauzy gowns.
To Emily Kirkpatrick, writer and author of celebrity fashion newsletter “I <3 Mess,” the moment was the natural culmination of fashion’s increasing preoccupation with provocation. Think: Miu Miu’s tiny hot pants, Saint Laurent’s sheer, nipple-baring dresses, and Mugler’s sliced-out bodysuits, just a few recent examples of “naked dressing” on the catwalk.
Celebrities are also showing more skin, a trend Kirkpatrick attributes to Julia Fox and her perpetually boundary-pushing outfits. The result? We’re suffering from nudity fatigue. “Thongs aren’t surprising anymore. G-strings aren’t surprising, butts aren’t surprising. Nipples are out, and we aren’t shocked by that anymore,” Kirkpatrick says. “What’s left to show? In my mind, it’s vagina.”
She continues: “There are two ways of doing that: You either flash everyone or you go the merkin route.” You heard it from Kirkpatrick first: Publicly flaunting one’s pubic hair (or pubic wig) is the next big thing.
Maybe it’s Margiela — maybe it’s also that Millennials and Gen Z’ers are now old enough to realize how toxic ’90s and early 2000s beauty standards were. Growing up, Olivia would shave off her pubic hair with a razor, a fruitless task. At one point, her mom even encouraged her to get it permanently lasered off. Now 23, Olivia doesn’t touch her pubes, aside from the occasional trim.
Mandel, too, has finally reached a point where she embraces her pubic hair, which she describes as “very thick.” And Bronwen, who asked to be referred to by her first name only, describes herself as “100 percent all in on the bush… Shaving it off is like cutting the crust off your sandwich.”
Adrian, 30, who also asked to be identified by his first name, feels similarly. “It turns out that [pubic hair] is usually what the men that I meet like. It’s funny how it has flipped. It used to be either trimmed or shaved — now, it’s the more natural, the better.”
McKee isn’t surprised that young people are embracing the bush. “Statistically, we know that the percentage of young people who identify as being queer [or] gender non-conforming is much higher than it has been in previous generations,” he says. “The very strict ways in which people used to manage their bodies and their dress to fit into one of two extremes really does seem to be expanding. It’s a continuum now, in a way that I haven’t seen before.”
But he notes that the great pubic hair grow-back isn’t necessarily the start of a sexual revolution — for now, it’s simply a trend that, like its countless predecessors, is probably destined to fade. “Fashion is defined by what only a minority can do,” McKee says. “So in a culture where, for a long time, it’s been encouraged that women lose their pubic hair, to have exaggerated pubic hair makes perfect sense to me.” In other words, the goalpost is always moving — and in most cases, adding more aesthetic labor to our plates. People who invested in lasering their pubic hair off are now reportedly restoring it via pubic hair transplants, a time-consuming and costly process.
The pendulum is swinging back with such force, in fact, that Fahs is beginning to notice merkins in porn. That’s right: 49 years after Hustler helped popularize hairlessness, pornography is reversing course — but instead of eroticizing real pubic hair, it’s eroticizing synthetic pubic hair.
Why go faux? It may be for practical reasons — years of Brazilians and laser hair removal can damage hair follicles, causing new strands to grow thinner (and in some cases, preventing new growth altogether). But Fahs suspects porn is turning to pubic wigs because our baseline understanding of pubic hair is so deeply warped.
“We don’t have a visual landscape to understand what the ‘standard variety’ of pubic hair looks like. We have to think of [pubic hair] as a fetish,” Fahs says, comparing the spectacle of “merkin porn” to menstrual porn, which offers exaggerated, almost comical depictions of periods. “What does a normal menstrual stain look like? We’re not going to see that in mainstream porn, and we’re not going to see the typical variety of pubic hair in mainstream porn.”
If Carrie Bradshaw were here, she might try to sum up pubic hair’s ebb and flow with a pithy punchline (“I couldn’t help but wonder…). But the history of pubic hair removal is too intertwined with gender, politics, and porn to reduce it to a clever one-liner. Instead, McKee gives us the following to ponder: “It doesn’t actually matter whether the demand is to grow pubic hair or to not have pubic hair — that’s not the problem. The problem is that we still live in a culture in which we’re required to make sense of our bodies under patriarchal structures.”
